Netizens and white-hat programmers will be familiar with Segal’s arguments, but most policymakers will not—and they deserve...
The director of the Council of Foreign Relations’ cyberspace policy program warns that the days of the open Internet may be closing as the medium becomes increasingly lawless.
The world’s nations have explored ways to leverage cyberspace since before there even was a cyberspace, but, as Segal (Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge, 2010, etc.) writes, the period from June 2012 to June 2013 might well be reckoned Year Zero in the battle to control cyberspace. In that period, those nation-states “visibly reasserted their control over the flow of data and information in search of power, wealth, and influence”—abandoning, in short, any utopian idea of the Internet as a vehicle to make the world a more prosperous place. More to the point, that time also saw the quickening of digital warfare against Iran, and specifically its nuclear program, with the development of the Stuxnet worm, one of whose stated aims was to “mess with Iran’s best scientific minds” and “make them feel like they were stupid.” A concurrent development was the reshaping of the old divisions between the public and private spheres. Although e-commerce is a private matter by near definition, it’s protected by the state, while the private sector controls the communication networks over which most Internet traffic passes, government communications included. In dry but precise prose, Segal examines numerous instances of cyberwar, some of which may come as news to readers—e.g., the digital skirmish fought between Russia and Estonia over a military memorial in 2007 and the sophisticated social media campaigns carried out by the Islamic State, blending “brutality and barbarism” with the most up-to-date software. The author also worries about the prospect of a fragmented, contested Internet beset by endless hacker attacks from Russia and China and that will be markedly less free than the one we are accustomed to.
Netizens and white-hat programmers will be familiar with Segal’s arguments, but most policymakers will not—and they deserve wide discussion.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-415-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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